3.16.2007

minsky quote of the day [from 1974]

I cannot state strongly enough my conviction that the preoccupation with consistency, so valuable for mathematical logic, has been incredibly destructive to those working on models of mind. at the popular level it has produced a weird conception of the potential capabilities of machines in general. at the "logical" level it has blocked efforts to represent ordinary knowledge, by presenting an unreachable image of a corpus of context-free "truths" that can stand almost by themselves. and at the intellect-modelling level it has blocked the fundamental realization that thinking begins first with suggestive but defective plans and images, that are slowly (if ever) refined and replaced by better ones. -- marvin minsky [conclusion to AI memo no. 306, a framework for representing knowledge, june 1974]